Grace’s mouth opened very slightly, but she didn’t say anything.
“Thing was, I had mountains of evidence. And one of my special talents was explaining complicated financial information to juries clearly enough for them to understand it. The jury was out for an hour and forty-five minutes. They came back with a verdict of guilty on all counts.”
He paused. Now for the hard part of this conversation.
“Then we went to sentencing. Perry tried to charm the jury again, but by then, they were onto him and he only irritated them more. When he realized he wasn’t going to weasel out of paying up, he blew his stack. Called the jury a bunch of illiterate day laborers and scum scraped off the sidewalk. Accused them of only being on a jury because they had nothing better to do with their lives. When the judge told him to sit down and be quiet, he made the other grave mistake in sentencing hearings of copping an attitude with the judge.”
“They threw the book at him, didn’t they?” Grace asked quietly.
“Oh yeah. The judge went along with the jury’s recommendation to make him pay back every penny he’d stolen, plus the maximum fine of $250,000 and forfeiture of everything he bought with the stolen money. He’d been embezzling for over a decade, and basically everything he owned was forfeited. His real estate holdings, personal house and vacation home, cars, furniture, art, his wife’s jewelry, and of course, all his stock and other investments. They wiped him out.” He hesitated, and then added, “The cherry on top of the sundae of suck was the judge sentenced him to 25 years in jail.”
“Whoa.”
“His wife was there every single day of the trial, sitting in the front row behind her husband. I had watched her learn in real time what a scumbag and liar her husband really was. I tore down everything she’d believed about him bit by bit over the course of that three-week trial. I saw the betrayal in her eyes, saw her anger, and eventually her despair. She sat in the front row when the sentence was read, and she didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. She had three kids pressed up against her, and the baby on her lap. She didn’t cry, and she didn’t look at me. She just sat there and died inside while her entire world was ripped away from her. I’ve carried around that picture of her in my head every day for three years, and I see her in my nightmares every night.”
He saw exactly the empathy and sorrow in Grace for Susanah Perry—Carter—that he’d expected. And he hated to be the one who’d put that look in her eyes.
He only had a little more to tell, but it was the most damning bit of the whole, awful tale. His voice sounded wooden to his ears as he spoke, but he couldn’t help it. This was the only way he was going to get through saying aloud what happened next.
“After the sentence was read, Perry’s lawyers asked the court to give him 24 hours before he reported to prison to say goodbye to his children because they were very young, I believe the daughter was six. The twin boys were about four, and the baby would have been maybe six months old. The judge agreed to the delay. Perry went home, spent the day with his family, went over to his elderly, diabetic mother’s house in the evening to say goodbye to her, stole most of her insulin, drove himself to the shipping company’s headquarters, and injected himself with all the insulin in the parking lot.”
Grace’s hand went over her mouth.
He stopped to breathe. The cat in Grace’s lap stretched and resettled.
After a few steadying breaths, he said, “I quit my job the day after Winston Perry’s funeral. I sold everything I owned and hit the road. After about six months of sitting in motel rooms drinking, and then sitting in motel room not drinking, which was worse, Hank and Dillon asked me to join the rodeo. It had a job mucking stalls and a bullfighter’s slot open.”
He paused, debating whether or not to share the rest of it with Grace, but he owed her nothing less than complete honesty. “The judge let Susannah Perry keep an educational trust fund for her kids, and the cash she had in a separate bank account of her own. It was enough for her to find housing and feed the kids for a few months. I’ve been sending her money anonymously every month since her husband died and the court seized everything. She doesn’t know the checks are from me. I set it up that way because I wanted her to take it without owing anything to the man who killed her husband.”
He looked at his hands.
He continued hoarsely, “I don’t know if I’d be here today if not for Hank and Dillon dragging me out of my spiral of guilt and self-hatred. They grabbed me by the collar, said I needed a change of scene and a job, or at least a reason to get out of bed every day, and that I needed my family. So I learned to dance with bulls. Turns out the only thing that erases the picture of Susannah and her kids for a little while is a two-thousand-pound death machine trying to flatten me.”
“Will you go back to bullfighting when your knee is better?” she asked quietly.
“Hank says my knee is done, and he’s as good a sports doctor as there is. My knee surgeon agrees with him. I was panicked when they told me I wouldn’t make it back into the arena with bulls. How was I going to live with the image of Susannah around the clock with no relief? And then I met you. You and Lily. My nightmares aren’t gone, but I’m not having them every night anymore, and I see the image less often during the day. Being around you and helping figure out who’s been bothering you has given me a sense of purpose I haven’t had for a long time.” He fell silent.
Grace was very still, her gaze turned inward to her thoughts. She stroked Marshmallow absently, and the cat purred loudly. Outside, the frogs filled all the space he was no longer filling with words.
“So that’s who I am,” he said. “I’m a man who drove another man to suicide. I’m a man who orphaned four little kids and widowed their mother. I’ve been running from myself and hiding from Susannah Perry for three years. I’m a murderer and a coward.”
Grace replied, “You’re also a man who’s been supporting a family you’re not responsible for. And you’re a man who agreed to help your brother keep his daughter, even though I can’t imagine how hard it’s going to be for you to step back into a courtroom.”
He opened his mouth to disagree, but she talked over him, cutting him off. “You didn’t kill Winston Perry. He did that to himself. He took millions of dollars, not you. He chose to put his family’s future in jeopardy by doing so. I don’t know much about shipping, but I expect he had a pretty big salary if he was a top guy at a big shipping firm.”
Reno nodded in affirmation.
“He could’ve chosen to live on the money he earned legitimately, like the rest of us do. Maybe he couldn’t have bought a vacation home or had as fancy a car, or given his wife fancy jewelry, but he could’ve lived within his means. He chose to lie to his wife. He chose to ignore his lawyer’s advice. He chose to be condescending to the jury and nasty to the judge. And most of all, Reno . . .” She waited to finish until he looked up reluctantly at her, and then she stared him dead in the eye as she finished, “Most of all, he chose to end his own life. Which, if you ask me, is a hundred times more cowardly than sending money anonymously to a widow and her kids.”
His gaze fell away from her direct stare as she silently willed him to believe her. He heard her words. Acknowledged that her logic was not flowed. But deep down in his gut, in the place that still bled from the wound of Susannah Perry looking at him in utter despair when her entire world was destroyed, that part of him couldn’t accept Grace’s words as true. It was his fault. All of it.
“Would Perry have gotten away with stealing all that money if you hadn’t taken the case and done the investigation?” Grace asked.
“Doubtful. The CEO was convinced Perry was embezzling from the company and the CEO would’ve hired some other lawyer to investigate it. Or he might’ve reported Perry to the FBI.”
“Would the FBI or some other lawyer have found enough evidence to convict Perry?”
“If whoever was assigned to the case was halfway competent, yes. Perry got sloppier, the longer he got away with it. And the longer he got away with it, the more he stole. People were starting to notice that something was off about the amount of money coming in and the profits being reported.”
